So far five GOP senators have objected to the idea of President Obama nominating Rice to be the next secretary of state. Two of those senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—are party leaders on foreign policy and frequent visitors to TV news studios. This is what makes the campaign particularly bizarre. Their case against her is not just unusually flimsy and transparently partisan; It also shines a glaring light on their own brazen hypocrisy (something most politicians do all they can to avoid).

Second, it was the intelligence community, not officials at the White House or State Department, that eliminated from the talking points used by Rice after the Benghazi attack the suspected involvement of the Libyan jihadist group, Ansar al-Sharia.

According to accounts of former CIA director David Petraeus' closed door testimony about Benghazi to congressional intelligence committees earlier this month, the intelligence community eliminated references to Ansar al-Sharia in the talking points so as not to tip off members of the terrorist group that the CIA believed that they were responsible for the attack.

The conspiracy therefore was not to mislead the American public but to mislead America's enemies.

If Rice had gone beyond her unclassified talking points and said that Ansar al-Sharia was suspected to be behind the Benghazi attacks, no doubt she would now be being hounded for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.